links

a living list of cool links, grouped by the things i care about. send me yours!

updated oct 28 2026

for multi-agent systems, trust and security, see the scaling trust community links: a separate reading list i curate with the team and community.

AI positive

Uplifting examples of AI: empowering individuals, lowering barriers to entry, and healing people and the planet. To help us dream of a better future, then make it real.

  • A computer for kids for kids aged 6–12 with no feed, no app store and no open internet. Kids draw, code, make music, films and write; an AI tutor helps when they get stuck without doing the work for them.
  • OpenDerm open-source robot that captures high-res images of the skin and reconstructs it in 3D to track changes over time, so melanoma can be caught early at home. Argues skin screening should be one of many jobs of a general-purpose home robot. See the blog post and the project.
  • A cancer vaccine for a dog Australian entrepreneur used ChatGPT plus university researchers to sequence his dog Rosie’s mast cell tumour, find the mutations and design a personalised mRNA vaccine; several tumours shrank.
  • Autonomous rescue drone Chinese autonomous rescue drone: flies at ~10–14 m/s up to ~2 km to a drowning person, lands to provide flotation for two 80 kg adults, then returns on its own.
  • Rare disease diagnoses at Boston Children’s Boston Children’s Hospital ran 376 unsolved rare-disease cases back through OpenAI’s o3. The AI produced shortlists of leads; after expert review and confirmatory testing, doctors landed 18 new diagnoses.
  • An open genome hackathon a family has opened their son’s genome and clinical data to the public so anyone can hunt for the cause of his Mosaic Variegated Aneuploidy, an ultra-rare condition affecting fewer than 50 people worldwide with no treatment. Hugging Face and Sage Bionetworks are running it as a hackathon, $50k in prizes from Anthropic and AWS.
  • ecdsa.fail Google found a far cheaper quantum attack on the cryptography behind Bitcoin and most of the web, then hid the method behind a zero-knowledge proof. Gautham Anant, 22 and taking an intro quantum computing course, aimed swarms of AI agents at the literature and opened a public leaderboard: 8 hours to match Google, 72 to beat them.
  • 23andMe at home 23andMe at home with local LLM inference (shared by Eito!)
  • Foray Bio grows plant materials, molecules and seeds from single plant cells instead of whole plants, with AI to make it work across species
  • More general AI for civil society · AI for Alzheimer’s

R&D & progress

How innovation has been, is, and could be organised to tackle new problems, and the policy that helps it along.

Open, sovereign & local tech

Open-source and local-first tools and hard tech: for citizen science, sovereignty, and resilience at the city level and below.

  • Parabl fast, affordable internet for apartment buildings and offices, with battery backup so it stays up when the power goes out
  • Radiant portable nuclear micro-reactor that replaces diesel generators (storyco has a video on them!)
  • Entanglement as energy transmission using entanglement as an alternative energy transmission method (!!), and part 2
  • Roc capture verifiably real moments in the age of AI
  • Open Source Observer open data on the open-source software supply chain: who builds what, and what depends on it

Institutions 2.0

Improving society’s ‘shock absorbers’, especially bottom-up.

  • Meaning Alignment Institute nonprofit working on aligning AI, and the institutions around it, with what people actually value
  • Pax Machina a publication for proposing and debating the institutions we’ll need in a world with powerful AI

Bio & health

Personal explorations, some links I stumble upon that i find cool!

  • Colossal company using CRISPR for the de-extinction of previously lost species
  • Cradle cryogenics, pressing pause on biological time for those who need it most
  • Cortical Labs code-deployable biological computer running computations using brain organoids
  • Neurode a headband that helps you improve focus, impulse control & memory in 20 minutes a day
  • PlasticList a project by Nat Friedman & co to quantify plastics found in specific foods we eat

Space & energy

Personal explorations, some links I stumble upon that i find cool!

Spirituality

Resources related to spirituality that have inspired me, and may inspire you.

Meditation retreats

  • BeppuZen introduction to Zen Buddhism & Japanese home cooking in a Japanese village next to an onsen city
  • Shogan-ji another Zen retreat in a Japanese village, it’s been highly recommended
  • Kopan Monastery Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Kathmandu offering a variety of courses and retreats, including a 10-day “Introduction to Buddhism”
  • Krishna Murti Centre a retreat centre in the UK recommended by friends that follows the teachings of Krishna Murti
  • Glendalough Sanctuary sanctuary to pause, reconnect, and soak in the natural peace of Wicklow
  • Holy Isle - Center for World Peace and Health hosts a retreat and course programme during the summer season, April to October.
  • Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey a monastery and retreat centre devoted to the practice of meditation within the Serene Reflection Meditation Tradition of Buddhism (Sōtō Zen)

Reads

In addition, the below were recommended as introductory books but I have not read them yet:

Frameworks

  • Downshift’s Annual Review a useful framework to introspect on the year that just unfolded, and to uncover, reconnect and help you live by your values.

Misc

Everything else.